Some days

I just don't know what to do.  I feel a little rudderless. 

I just read Mike Brown's book "How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming" (I think that was the title).  Pretty good.  He has this point though, where he realizes he doesn't put in the crazy hours as a professor he did as a grad student.  And he realizes if he wants to keep doing the side-bar stuff that he loves (looking for "planets" past Pluto) he's going to have to go back to working crazy hours. 

 

I feel that I'm in that kind of position.  There's nothing more I can accomplish in the 8-10 hours a day I'm working.  There's really nothing more I can accomplish than what I'm already accomplishing at my "real" job.  The only way I can add to my CV any more quickly, at this point, is to start dipping into the late-night or early morning hours.

 

Is that worth it?  Having the hours I'm awake set by children and a 'day job' makes it really difficult for me to work those crazy hours.  I don't even know if what I'd be working on during those hours (mostly older, unpublished datasets from earlier projects and meta-analysis) would be valuable additions to my CV.  I do know that if I try to do those kinds of things, periodically I'm going to get super-tired and just become a bear to live with. 

 

I don't know if that's worth it.  Until the middle of last summer, I was still dealing, in some way, with sleep deprivation related to children.  Maybe I still am.  Maybe after another month of getting to sleep through the night (thanks to littlest going to bed easily) I'll start to feel like working the early or late shifts won't be such a burden.